


Jupiter Triune

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Community: trope_bingo, Multi, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-07
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-16 16:43:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3495527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stinger explains some finer points of Splice etiquette to Jupiter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jupiter Triune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [queerlyobscure (softestpunk)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/softestpunk/gifts).



> Jupiter Ascending characters do not belong to me and I am making no money off this work of fan fiction.
> 
> Ticks the 'immortality/reincarnation' square for Trope Bingo 2015, but that's mostly a coincidence.
> 
> * * *

Jupiter often thinks of them as planets.

She is Jupiter, naturally. Now that she owns Earth she figures that gives her the right to acknowledge her namesake, the biggest deal in the Solar System. The secrets that she hides from her family—including that she owns earth and she’s dating a space werewolf—are the secrets hidden under the Great Red Spot. She resolves not to let them damage the world the way that Balem’s industrial people puree plant would have, though.

Caine is pretty clearly Mars. Enough like Earth to maybe be habitable one day, but still distant enough to be its own self. Communicating with him is as much a matter of areoforming herself as terraforming him. Some days they’re synchronous; others he’s all Splice and “your majesty” and she’s clearly not orbiting on his level.

After some thought she realizes that Stinger is Earth. Not humans. Earth. Earth who would prefer to be left alone and get on with Nature. Earth with her one moon—Kiza, who circles her father at a distance but is still pretty clearly the beacon light in his life.

It makes her wonder, though, where the other light is. While Jupiter’s aware that there are potentially huge differences between Splices and humans, surely Kiza must have a mother out there somewhere.

* * *

They’re sitting on Stinger’s back porch, Jupiter in a rocking chair, Stinger on a backless glider that gives his translucent wings room to move. Jupiter has grown used to the random honeycombs everywhere, and she knows she won’t be stung, but she still looks anywhere but up, just in case one of those sweet stalactites is right overhead.

“Kiza’s mother? Oh... You think I’m a drone!” Stinger shakes his head. “I wasn’t born a drone.”

“I thought worker bees were sterile,” Jupiter says. _And female_ , she thinks but doesn’t say.

“They are. But queens aren’t,” Stinger says, looking fondly at Kiza as she mutters over the essay she’s writing, feet up on the porch rail, tablet braced against her knees.

“So you’re—you were born—”

Stinger clears his throat. “Majesty, you’re getting close to a severe breach of etiquette,” he says, voice dipping into its lowest register of rumble-hum. The bees closest by buzz a gentle warning; Jupiter is learning to understand them. Not like learning a foreign language. More like remembering something that she used to know how to do but just forgot for a little while.

“I’m sorry! The handbook doesn’t cover this!” Or if it does, she hasn’t read that far. “You can tell me if I’m being rude.”

“It’s less about the handbook and more about common courtesy toward trans people. Whether that means transgender people or transgenic people.”

“Transgenic people?”

“That would be one of the politer terms for Splices.”

“That’s not in the handbook either,” Jupiter says, at this point thoroughly confused.

“The handbook was written for Entitled, for Recurrences. Why would they need to be polite to Splices?” Stinger gives her a moment to gawp and then adds, “Not that you’re much like other Entitled, mind you.”

“I’m... not?”

“No. You haven’t ordered anyone dead yet. You don’t use Regenex.” He touches her cheek. “Not that you need it.”

“I’ll never use that stuff,” Jupiter says with a vehemence that surprises them both.

“No,” Stinger agrees. “I can’t picture it.”

“Not even as medicine.”

Stinger bites his tongue on that one.

* * *

Jupiter sidles back to the same topic after several minutes of conversation, taking a different tack. “Is Stinger your real name? It’s a weird name for someone to use on Earth.”

“Oh, I’ve had others.” Stinger smiles and reels off a string of names: Beckett, Madhukar, Erlea, Phuang, Devri, Melissa. Different places, different names, more or less the same general meaning underneath.

“But... Melissa’s a girl’s name.”

Stinger doesn’t tell her that Melissa is not the only girl’s name in his list, and simply says, “I know. It was what I was being called when I gave birth to Kiza.”

“You—you did?”

“Unfortunately, the ability to lay eggs wasn’t part of the genetics program. So yes, I did.”

“Caine always calls you ‘he’,” Jupiter says.

“As I said, it’s simple courtesy. True best friends don’t out each other.” Stinger’s expression softens. “But lov—trusted friends may earn the privilege of knowing secrets.”

“So you’re really Kiza’s mother?”

“ _He’s_ my _father_ ,” Kiza herself chimes in, not looking up from her standard issue Earth tablet.

“Does that mean that Kiza has a mo—a fa—another parent out there?”

“Have you ever heard of parthogenesis? Thelytoky?” Jupiter shakes her head no to both. “Long story short, no. There’s a strain of bacteria—”

“Okay, okay, _okay_ , I’m not sure I _want_ to know now.”

“Neither did I,” Kiza says, still intent on her homework. “But Dad thinks it’s important for people to know where they came from.”

Jupiter thinks of Chicago and Russia and the deep blue sea. Stinger thinks of the deeper black of space and the bright pain of having his wings reattached.

“Dad, careful.” Kiza reaches out to grab her notepad before her father’s whirring wings blow it away.

“I hadn't noticed...” Jupiter makes a gesture that indicates she’s talking about something that perhaps she shouldn’t be talking about in front of her lover’s daughter.

“Science is golden,” Stinger says, ignoring Kiza’s nigh-audible eye roll. Whether it’s at his questionable choice of words or just that Jupiter and Stinger are trying to hide something that Kiza is well aware of isn’t clear, not least because Kiza remains focused on her work.

* * *

They’re still talking when Caine returns, the front door of the house slamming two minutes after the bees have already told Jupiter that he’s on his way. He looks exhausted but victorious.

“Your Majesty,” he greets Jupiter, which means the fierce grin is a matter of state and not of having snagged a great sale on steak. “The date is set.”

Stinger punches the air. Jupiter can feel her own returning grin stretch her cheeks.

Kiza stands up and says, “If you’re going to talk politics, I’m going into town.”

The three of them wait for her to leave before Jupiter and Stinger both say, “When?” and Caine grins.

“A month,” he says. “It will take that long for—”

“Paperwork,” Jupiter guesses.

“Exactly.”

“But you think we might win? I might win?”

“That idiot Titus should have read his own wedding regulations before he tried to use them against someone else,” Stinger says, the underhum in his voice pitched a little higher with glee.

“We’ll do everything we can to make sure you do,” Caine says, resting his right hand on Stinger’s shoulder and reaching his left out to Jupiter. Jupiter gets out of her chair and lets Caine’s arm slip around her shoulder, her fingers finding Stinger’s, the three of them aligning.

“Live by the marriage contract, get bankrupted by the marriage contract,” Stinger says.

Caine kisses Jupiter, and then presses his cheek against the top of Stinger’s head, and Jupiter thinks that, for two men who came into her life so unexpectedly, she couldn’t have chosen better princes.

If princes is even the word. Is princes even the word?

“I guess I have some more reading to do,” she says, and both of them nod.

Jupiter settles back into her chair, trying not to make it obvious that rather than starting with the intricate legalities of what happens when a marriage is only half completed by a member of House Abrasax and a Recurrence, she’s looking up _transgenic_.

She won’t be making that mistake again.


End file.
